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Diane Carbonell: 150 Pounds Gone Forever

CBN.com  PUTTING ON THE HIPSDiane was a normal sized toddler and teenager. She was adopted into a military family that expected perfection. As controlling as her parents were, Diane says her bad food choices were hers alone. Her mother prepared healthy foods and insisted that Diane stay active, but when she got her license, Diane enjoyed the joys of drive-through restaurants and candy aisles in grocery stores. She would hide the packages of candy in the back of her closet. Soon Diane’s mother started noticing she was gaining weight. In college, Diane was adding weight on a regular basis. After she met John, they spent their dating years eating fattening dinners and tubs of buttered popcorn.

In 1987, John and Diane were married and at 5’ 10,” Diane weighed a respectable 165 pounds. At work, Diane stored treats in her desk drawer and still gained weight. At 24, Diane was pregnant with her first daughter and went from 196 to 271 pounds. After giving birth, Diane says the first 25 pounds came off but the rest stayed on. She kept gaining weight and soon stopped volunteering at church and avoided social situations. Once Diane says she was in a chair in the nursery with her baby. As she stood up, the chair came with her. “There I was, half-standing, with a rocking chair attached to my rear end,” says Diane. She made all of her clothes and stopped wearing bathing suits and shorts. One day, Diane got the courage to measure herself with a tape measure. As she tried to measure her hips, Diane says the tape measure, which is 60 inches, wouldn’t go around her hips. “My hips were bigger than that,” she says. So she grabbed some string and wrapped it around her hips. The string was 65 inches long. “I was as big around as my best friend was tall,” says Diane.

FIT TO THE FINISH
Diane was frustrated by constantly dieting and felt like she failed the Lord. “I wasn’t treating my body the way God intended,” she says. “Over and over, I would join a program and never followed through on any of my promises.” Diane tried fad diets featured in books and magazines. “No matter what I tried, I never lost weight.” One day, Diane was getting weighed at the doctor’s office. The scale showed a number just under 300 pounds. She thought, How had I come to be this overweight, underactive, lazy, morbidly obese woman? She asked the Lord for strength. “Give me strength to resist the foods I love,” she asked. Diane decided to try something new for herself and focused on three components for her Fit to the Finish plan: portion control, exercise and fat percentage. In 14 months, Diane lost a total of 158 pounds and has kept it off for 14 years. After she lost weight, Diane had 4 more kids. (She and her husband have a total of 7). After each pregnancy she committed to exercising and cutting back calories so she could safely lose weight.

“I developed Fit to the Finish because I wanted something easy enough to follow my whole life without constantly having to look up calories or count fat grams,” says Diane. After 14 years of weight maintenance, Diane says she spends little time researching foods. “Proper portion control coupled with appropriate fat percentages will reduce your calories to a level that is appropriate for weight loss,” says Diane. According to the 2010 Dietary Guildelines for Americans, fat should make up between 20 and 35 percent of your diet. The goal is not just the number on the scale. “I found that the months following my weight loss were actually more difficult than the last few months of losing weight,” says Diane. “It was a battle to stay on top of my eating habits and to figure out the right balance between eating enough to maintain my weight and not eating so much as to gain weight.”